Use of Facebook’s Translation Tool by Tertiary Students

Ever since Facebook has become the most popular Social Network Site all over the world, translating posts into other languages have become a must. Facebook now uses translation function between different languages. The present study seeks to explore the use of Facebook’s translation function by the Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU) students. EMU is an international university where there are students from 106 countries. These students are in contact with each other and are in need of translation from one language to another during their studies. In this study, quantitative research methodology has been used. In total, 350 questionnaires have been distributed and 336 are completed by the participants. The questionnaire has a total of 36 questions, 18 of which are demographic questions while the remaining are 5-point Likert scale questions. The results obtained from the study show that students who are studying in an international university, prefer to use Facebook’s translation tool even though they are not satisfied by the quality of the translations they receive. The findings of the study indicate that, there are 8 different languages that EMU students mainly use. To better improve this study, a study can be carried out with a larger population to get more accurate results. Furthermore, a similar study can be performed in other international universities to observe where the findings show similarities or differences